


Down To Your Bones

by Good_Grief



Series: short stories with even shorter plots [3]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Also Madness, Angst, Cannibalism, Dark!Tobirama, Edo Tensei, Eternal Tsukiyomi, Eternal Tsukiyomi Gone Wrong, I Was Drunk When I Wrote This, Is it cannibalism if it’s a hallucination?, Is it necrophilia if they are both already dead?, M/M, Madness, Necrophilia, Sorry Not Sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 10:41:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29081058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Good_Grief/pseuds/Good_Grief
Summary: Before his kingdom, Tobirama bows at the knees and bends before he breaks. He finds his way to the center, where Madara lies with his ebony mane, where Hikaku stands guard over their clan. This is the home he has built for Izuna.The Eternal Tsukuyomi was never meant to house the minds of those who were ripped through the veil by Edo Tensei.
Relationships: Edo Tensei Senju Tobirama/Uchiha Izuna’s Corpse Head, Senju Tobirama/Uchiha Izuna
Series: short stories with even shorter plots [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2099337
Comments: 5
Kudos: 11





	Down To Your Bones

**Author's Note:**

> TRIGGERS: Error on the side of NSFW. VERY DARK!Tobirama  
> ACTS OF CANNIBALISM/ACTS OF NECROPHILIA (A little glazed over but they are both there) Its limited to like a paragraph and not horrifically graphic but it’s there. No it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. 
> 
> (Edo Tensei Tobirama x Izuna’s zombie head)
> 
> I did minor editing but my original note for this story speaks volumes: “This was art but now it’s a story. Not sorry. Just Drunk and Sleepy. You’re Welcome.”

**Down To Your Bones**

The sky above could be crimson or grey for all that Tobirama cares. Some days it’s pale with the haze of morning after a storm, and some days it’s violent, as if reflecting rivers of blood. 

Eternal Tsukuyomi was never meant to house the dreams of the dead, and now they are the damned. 

On that fateful day, when the moon was called from the sky and all the rest of the souls were caught as if in a net, they were given the dreams of peace, dreams they had hung paper wishes on bamboo stalks for. 

It is not so for the souls of the reanimated dead. Those ripped from the quiet place back to earthly bodies as the beast called war eats its fill. The last Great War claims them all, the young and the old and the living dead. It is as if the illusion has been tainted by his abomination of a life force. Hell herself chewed his dreams up and spat them out, and this is what becomes of them. 

He stands alone in his dream, feet planted on an endless battlefield. A place of peace that is bought and sold in blood and iron. The body of every Uchiha his mind could remember stretched before him in the aftermath. 

In the early days he pretends that they simply went to sleep. They have collapsed like puppets with cut strings, lifeless Uchiha dolls strewn about haphazardly in his mindscape. At first he’s even aware that it’s not the right kind of dream, that there’s a creeping wrongness on the fringes, that the grey sky sometimes opens up like a great crimson eye.

Sometimes he feels judged, sometimes he feels empty. The judgement comes in the form of silent crows, they come to pick at the morose battlefield, they peck and caw but in their wrongness, they make no sound. There is no whistle in his inhales, no relief in his exhales, and no heart echoing in the emptiness like a drum in his chest. 

The early days last only as long as his memory of their features. Flesh goes first, and now he wanders a field of rotting corpses that do not smell and do not creek. He searches the skeletons and finds features. One he comes back too, over and over, clumps of hair tied back in a waterfall with leather thongs. Three tiers of distinction.  _ Hikaku _ .

There he sits for a long time, unmoving as he makes his first friend, the isolation becoming a little less. He congratulates Hikaku on his strength of arms, on his cleverness, on causing his family to complain. He peels back empty eyelids to reveal shadow pits of emptiness and alas, he cannot remember the finer details of his Sharingan, and the dream can only fill in the parts he can remember. 

He sits with rotting flesh until the crimson sun bleaches his friend down to the bones. Tobirama holds vigil and Tobirama remembers. 

By the time he looks up from his newfound friend, the battlefield has suffered the same fate. Clothing, black and blue like a bleeding under the surface has dissipated along with flesh smoking and rotting and drying. 

The crows have fled or retreated and left no signs of their presence in their wake. Tobirama hazily realizes how alone he is without their presence, but how surrounded he could be by new friends if he took the time. 

He gathers the skulls one by one. 

His strong hands snap spines and necks; a craftsman aware of the nuances of a fine craft. A former master in the art of separating bone from other bones, flesh from flesh and life from body. 

The pile grows, all of the skulls in one place, and with the passing of time he is edging out farther and farther until he finds another familiarity. 

Cloth bandages cover the side of Madara’s leftover face. The cloth soaked in blood seems to remain as if a stronger memory than that of their cloaks. A wild mane of black coarse hair marks his identity as surely as the Sharingan in his skull. Circles of black and crimson like the eye of the storm above him. He knows this face. He feels the edges of the jaw under his fingers and remembers the snapping retorts and the fleeting dreams of peace, so different from what has befallen him here. Peace, bought, sold and brokered all the way down the bones. 

He gatherers and drags the skulls back to his piled grave, usually in armfuls tucked under his chin. Madara, though, he carries alone. Both of Tobirama’s hands cradle the remainder of his brother’s hopes and dreams. He stays for days with his pile of Uchiha skulls and Uchiha friends. He hosts a funeral and a wake in voidal silence, but not all on his own. Hikaku is here, as is Madara. His fingers brush over the unique features of his favoured enemies, before he leaves his pile once more.

All of the rest of the Uchiha have been gathered when he finds Izuna. This one, this pile of bones and cloth and hair he remembers greatly. 

The flash of the Uchiha coat, navy so deep it was indistinguishable from indigo, and embroidery catching his eye in white and red. A fan for the flames of the clan, for the hearth and the lifeblood. His own clothes have disintegrated down to only the fur of his collar with time, and the drawing of his memory, but Izuna’s coat is still here. It’s ragged and worn, with a slice right through the family crest, but it’s tangible, maybe even real. 

He ties the fabric around his waist in a mockery of faulds. Izuna’s hands, he treasures for their talent, and he cannot bear to leave them behind. He tears a strip of the coat with his teeth, the soundlessness causing no more eerie distress as he cannot recall what it should sound like. 

From the cloth he tears many more strips, and with them he twists many a rope for many a purpose. Some to thread the fillangees together to hold themselves, some to attach the ulna and the radius to his thighs so Izuna’s hands might cover his knees and not be forgotten to rot in this place, the skill to be remembered, the bones to be revered. 

Izuna’s spine lies exposed but Tobirama sees no need to separate it from his head, and while the flesh of the spine and the connection of nerves is long gone, from the neck to the right side of his face, Izun’s skin remains. His eyes are not to be found, as Tobirama knows what skull he has found them in. The bandages that he wears over the eyeless sockets are stained in black rot and crimson, but never tears, Tobirama remembers. 

Izuna was a great warrior, the greatest of rivals. Tobirama cuts more ties from the leftover coat. Ties each column of his spine to the next until they sway in the wind without his arms to steady them. 

He takes all of the pieces of Izuna that matter and he carries them back to his mountain of Uchiha remnants. 

He toils to arrange his clan around them as if to greet the sun that will never come.  _ Uchiha rise with the sun, he _ says, but the words are soundless as always, his lips are tough, clumsy and heavy without the ability to hear the sound as it forms. 

There is no one here to listen, and Izuna cares likely not but for to hear it. 

He makes his way back to the back to the pile of bones, where his enemy lays to rest, where the dreams of his brother lie broken and the dreams of his father’s lie realized. 

Before his kingdom, Tobirama bows at the knees and bends before he breaks. He finds his way to the center, where Madara lies with his ebony mane, where Hikaku stands guard over their clan. This is the home he has built for Izuna.

He curls up in the battlefield with the bones of his enemies, skulls of the nameless and skulls of his only company. There is no one left to find now, no bodies left unattended for the crows that once flit about, and besides, Izuna is the one he was always looking for. 

Here, with Izuna’s jaw cradled in his hand. Under the grey or crimson sky and the perversion of a dream, he curls Izuna’s spine around his arm and over his hips in a caricature of an embrace. His long, elegant fingers brush over a cheekbone of literal bone, his lips caress the corner of a lopsided mouth.

His tongue runs under the edges of fraying bandages with little texture and no discernible taste. Here he does as he wishes, and partakes in the flesh of his enemy, consumption of the dream eating him and Tobirama responding by eating what little flesh has been left to him. A hunger that is dark and desirous, his teeth biting down into a wicked tongue, wishing as though the act of chewing and swallowing the overworked muscle would grant him the gift of speech.

It never does, and as he rolls in those bones, seaking release and relief of a tongueless mouth and an eyeless face, he takes comfort that he cannot hear his own deranged cries and raging delirium.

Here there be monsters, and here there be madness. He clings hard to a ragged ponytail as he drags Izuna’s jaw and teeth down his chest, scraping lower, till he can fill the hollows with his fingers and cock. He cries soundless but not wordless as Izuna’s gift grants him the sloppy shapes upon which to fasten his lips around, but no way for them to escape the confines of his mind and reach his deafened ears. He whispers sweet nothings into the side of a face that is slipping away, and he clings to his illusions, real and imagined within them. 

Here with the enemy at his back and his penance and forgiveness at his fingertips, he rides the waves of revelry and delirious relief. Now, this dreamless and cruel eternal sleep can find him drowning. 

**Author's Note:**

> I have also made:
> 
> [Art for this fic ](https://good-grievance.tumblr.com/post/639442139353317376/watercolor-duet-of-dark-tobirama-and-izunas)


End file.
